Nicolette Hill didn’t need a consultant to tell her the system was broken. As Gallo Mechanical’s Safety Administrator, she was receiving boxes of handwritten forms from offices in North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, and other job sites throughout the Southeast. Some she couldn’t read. None were searchable. All of them were waiting on her desk.
“We were archaic. We were using pen and paper. And servicing so many readers at once, with me being the administrator who’s in charge of all of those documents, we really needed a way to automate and bring ourselves into the future as well as make us a leader in the industry.”
– Nicolette Hill, Safety Administrator, Gallo Mechanical Gallo Mechanical is a commercial HVAC, plumbing, and sheet metal company headquartered in New Orleans, with roughly 600 employees across multiple states. Workers face confined spaces, heights, scaffolding, piping, and regular equipment hazards every day. That kind of scale demands visibility that paper simply can’t deliver. Without a digital solution, incident reporting was a guessing game. Field leaders didn’t always know who to contact at headquarters. Subcontractors and general contractors had no clear way to verify training. Regional offices mailed in documents that quickly filled up boxes in Hill’s office. “You also had the issue to where, when we were reporting for incidents and accidents and doing different investigations, you had two things that will always come up,” she says, “One, how do I reach headquarters if I don’t know their point of contact? Two, how do I resubmit this back to our general contractor or any of our subcontractors who also have an interest in what may have happened on the job site?”
“It was just a no-brainer that we needed some type of safety management software.”
– Nicolette Hill, Safety Administrator, Gallo Mechanical Gallo evaluated several platforms, but Novara stood out for one specific reason: field leaders actually wanted to use it.
“If the team doesn’t buy into it, we have no need for it.”
– Nicolette Hill, Safety Administrator, Gallo Mechanical Want to see how safety teams drive real participation at scale? Download this guide for key steps to encouraging team members to actively contribute to safer operations. The feedback from workers was clear—the platform was easier than to use than their current paper-based process. Full customization sealed the decision. Gallo needed forms for job safety analyses, fleet vehicle inspections, quality control, and equipment tracking. They also needed to be able to adapt forms to fit the requirements of the various states they operate in. Novara Flex let them configure everything without waiting on IT. The results came fast—and they weren’t just administrative. Gallo now processes roughly 1,600 form submissions per quarter across three companies. Workers submit daily JSAs before any work begins, no matter the site or region. QR codes on hard hats link directly to employee profiles, showing certifications, journeyman licenses, and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) credentials. Supervisors can verify training before someone steps onto equipment. Workflows do the follow-up automatically. If a foreman forgets to sign out workers at the end of the day, a notification fires to the safety manager. Fleet vehicle inspections feed directly to the fleet manager in Baton Rouge, flagging expired tags and license plates the moment they’re reported. Nothing falls through the cracks. For Nicolette, the time savings are concrete.
“Novara saves me at least a full day a week, probably more like an entire extra week every month, because I’m not waiting on paperwork from different regions. I’m not scanning in page by page. We’re not scrambling looking for documents.”
– Nicolette Hill, Safety Administrator, Gallo Mechanical That recovered time goes directly into safety improvement work: analyzing incident trends by region, implementing a world-class heat safety program, reviewing quarter-over-quarter data, and pushing targeted safety goals to field leaders. More importantly, the culture shifted.
“We had an increase in field leaders talking about safety, wanting to make safety a priority. People understood that we actually cared more about them than just the company.”
– Nicolette Hill, Safety Administrator, Gallo Mechanical Workers who once resisted technology came around because, as Hill explains, “You can use this program, and it requires the same amount of energy you were already putting in… but now you can do it with just a click of a button.” The impact Gallo has seen so far from Flex is just the beginning. Nicolette’s goals for 2026 include expanding administrative access to regional leaders, connecting Flex to other construction management tools via API, and continuing to build out custom training modules for company-specific scenarios.
“If we can build it out and customize it to what we need it to be, if it can interconnect through the API with any of the other programs we have coming online, I think that’s going to keep us in a long relationship with Novara for years to come.”
– Nicolette Hill, Safety Administrator, Gallo Mechanical Flex lets Gallo Mechanical manage 600 workers, three companies, and multiple regions from one platform. If your team is still chasing paper forms or hunting down training records, there’s a better way. See what Flex can do for your business with a personalized demo. Explore more comprehensive articles, specialized guides, and insightful interviews selected, offering fresh insights, data-driven analysis, and expert perspectives.The Problem: Scattered Data, No Line of Sight
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